Maddening I Tell You

Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing (EMDR)

Today we determined my next phase of therapy. It appears I am obsessed with my mother's death, which is becoming more difficult for me to cope with. The combination of PTSD and the stages of grief often intertwine. I experienced my biggest emotional disturbance to date - last night. I will not discuss it further, all I can say is I went to Amy and Dan and said I need help; please watch over me.

Tomorrow it will be 6 months since her suicide, and I'm besides myself. I smoked a full pack of cigarettes today. I've been roaming about the house, totally unsure of what to do with myself. My work is less than remarkable this week. Normally, I can separate my workday from my grieving day, but this week I can not. It sucks.

When I close my eyes at night I hear my father saying, "Ann-Marie your mother is dead. She shot herself in the head." The EMDR might help stop this sentence that plays on a loop. Maddening I tell you.

What Is EMDR?
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) integrates elements of many effective psychotherapies in structured protocols that are designed to maximize treatment effects. These include psychodynamic, cognitive behavioral, interpersonal, experiential, and body-centered therapies. EMDR is an information processing therapy and uses an eight phase approach.

During EMDR the client attends to past and present experiences in brief sequential doses while simultaneously focusing on an external stimulus. Then the client is instructed to let new material become the focus of the next set of dual attention. This sequence of dual attention and personal association is repeated many times in the session.

Why?
All humans are understood to have a physiologically-based information processing system. This can be compared to other body systems, such as digestion in which the body extracts nutrients for health and survival. The information processing system processes the multiple elements of our experiences and stores memories in an accessible and useful form. Memories are linked in networks that contain related thoughts, images, emotions, and sensations. Learning occurs when new associations are forged with material already stored in memory.When a traumatic or very negative event occurs, information processing may be incomplete, perhaps because strong negative feelings or dissociation interfere with information processing. This prevents the forging of connections with more adaptive information that is held in other memory networks. For example, a rape survivor may “know” that rapists are responsible for their crimes, but this information does not connect with her feeling that she is to blame for the attack. The memory is then dysfunctionally stored without appropriate associative connections and with many elements still unprocessed. When the individual thinks about the trauma, or when the memory is triggered by similar situations, the person may feel like she is reliving it, or may experience strong emotions and physical sensations. A prime example is the intrusive thoughts, emotional disturbance, and negative self-referencing beliefs of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Signing off.